Sutherland: “…one MP told me, “You can fight corruption and play politics at the same time.”<\/p>\n
Inskeep: LAUGHTER “Well it’s good that they’re honest about it.”<\/p>\n
![\"iraqiflag\"](\"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/mediarepublic\/files\/2009\/05\/iraqiflag.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
The true cognitive dissonance was that I heard this icky bit of us\/them journalism just a few minutes after the newscast in which (you’ll have to take my word for it, I can’t find NPR archiving their newscasts on the web in audio or text, and they don’t seem to have done a “real” story on it anywhere) they reported, calmly, that KBR (remember them?) was being sued for faulty electrical work for the US military that resulted in multiple deaths. The brief report ended blandly with the sentence: “A spokesperson for KBR said the company was not responsible for the deaths.” Gee, wouldn’t it be funny if we had some politicians willing to fight that corruption?? (See a not-bland story on the scandal at RealClearPolitics<\/a>).<\/p>\n To review: corruption in Iraq worth millions and resulting in death and injury, but\u00a0 practiced by a US corporation? Gotta be reported of course, but no emotion required, and certainly no attempt to question why Dick Cheney isn’t joining the Iraqi Trade Minister on trial. Corruption in Iraq practiced by Iraqis and little signs of real democracy in this otherwise comic state? Now that’s funny.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" “Stories of corruption are common in Iraq. Prosecutions for corruption are not.” Steve Inskeep and J.J. Sutherland discussed the fact that the Iraqi trade minister has been arrested for astonishingly bold corruption. In their conversation\u00a0 (if you have four minutes – go listen) sounded alternately shocked, shocked at the stuff this guy got away with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1659,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2221],"tags":[401,6020,3882],"class_list":["post-302","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cappucino","tag-iraq","tag-media-bias","tag-npr"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mediarepublic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mediarepublic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mediarepublic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mediarepublic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1659"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mediarepublic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=302"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mediarepublic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":419,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mediarepublic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302\/revisions\/419"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mediarepublic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=302"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mediarepublic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=302"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mediarepublic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=302"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}